Alteration & Renovation?Summary The proposed project will increase research productivity at Saint Michael's College (SMC) by addressing a current impediment: autoclave capacity and prep space. Since the inception of VGN, SMC has increased its STEM faculty by greater than 50% while the percentage of STEM students has almost doubled. SMC?s success in STEM has created a bottleneck in media preparation and waste processing which affects at least five faculty and their students. The proposed project will address this issue by doubling the autoclave capacity and through the addition of a new prep room in the Biology Department. We expect that faculty will be able to increase their research activities through these renovations by decreasing the wait to prepare media and reagents as well as process waste.